I didn't delete it. We don't delete anything on HN unless the user who posted it asks us to.
I did mark it [dupe], which is short for 'duplicate', because it's the same story as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24309632. We don't want two different threads about the same story, because it leads to split discussions and because there are so few slots on the front page.
In such cases, we pick one of the threads to be the main discussion and merge comments from the other one into it. I picked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24309632 because it was posted earlier than yours, and also because it seems to link to a more substantive article.
You can't draw much signal from that. Any submission about that story making the front page would get lots of upvotes, and there are a lot of random or extraneous factors affecting which ones make the front page.
